Friday, April 3, 2009

I guess the makers of Twitter are going to make some money after all (maybe). I think the story goes this way:

1. Facebook wants to buy Twitter with Facebook stock. Since share prices for private companies are usually overinflated, Facebook is laughed out the door. Dejected, Facebook changes its homepage interface yet again to try to compete. Exit Facebook from the story.

2. Twitter introduces a way for real-time searching, or at least the Twitter platform lends itself to this innovation, outdoing Google's asynchronous webcrawling, cached search - because that's so '90s. Ask Yahoo!

3. Microsoft wants to own Twitter, so they can beat Google in the search engine game. While Bill Gates has been able to shed his '90s monopolistic persona in exchange for a save-the-world megalomaniacal one (release the mosquitoes!), Microsoft with Steve Ballmer as CEO has not been able to shed that very same '90s monopolistic persona. Windows Vista's reputation doesn't help, either (as I write this on an XP netbook). In contrast, both Apple and Google have yet to suffer a significant anti-trust, anti-conglomerate backlash from pop culture (and the government).

4. The founders of Twitter sold Blogger to Google for a pretty penny half a decade ago. Their friend Google is now interested in Twitter search. The chances are good that Google will own Twitter very soon.

5. Twitter will then be full of Google Ads.

Full disclosure: If this goes as planned, I will make money from Google, and I will lose money from Microsoft. At least the market as a whole seems to be on an upswing. Oops, I may have jinxed the market for today. C'est la vie. Be zen, my friends.